Services / Religious trauma
When faith and pain have become difficult to separate.
Something you were taught, asked to carry, or made to believe about yourself still has a hold on you. It may be shame that comes up when you disappoint someone, anxiety around making your own choices, difficulty trusting your instincts, or a sense you never quite measure up. You may still hold your faith close. You may have stepped away. Whatever your relationship to faith looks like, your experience is welcome here.
Schedule a free consultation →The premise
The past does not stay in the past simply because you have moved on.
Most people who bring spiritual hurt into therapy have already tried to sort it out on their own, usually for a long time. They have read the books. They have had the late conversations with a friend. They have prayed about it, or stopped praying about it, and neither one settled it. You may have changed your mind about what you believe, moved away from the people or places that hurt you, or built a life that looks very different from the one you grew up in. Yet certain moments may still bring a familiar fear, shame, or sense of being watched. You may find yourself reacting to authority, conflict, desire, or disappointment in ways that feel larger than the present moment.
This is not a sign that you have failed to move on. It reflects how deeply formative religious experiences can be, especially when they were tied to belonging, love, family, safety, or the fear of losing them.
Therapy can offer a place to look at these experiences without pressure to preserve, reject, explain, or resolve them. Rather than asking you to take a position, we work to understand what these experiences asked of you, what they cost, and how they may still be shaping your relationships, choices, and life now.
Who I work with
Whether you stayed, left, or are still figuring out what remains.
Your faith or religious community may still matter deeply to you, even as some part of your experience has become difficult to hold. You may be wrestling with teachings, expectations, relationships, or a sense of shame and fear that no longer aligns with what you believe. You may be trying to hold onto what is meaningful while needing to be honest about what has hurt.
Therapy can help you take those experiences seriously without assuming your faith is the problem or asking you to defend it. Together, we can make room for what you value, what has been painful, and what’s emerging.
You may have stepped away from a church, a community, or a way of believing that once organized much of your life. From the outside, it may appear that you have moved on. But you notice that you carry guilt that does not quite fit the life you are living now, or grieve a sense of home, belonging, and certainty that was lost along with what you needed to leave.
Leaving does not make the loss uncomplicated. You may miss people, rituals, belonging, or parts of faith that once felt meaningful, while also carrying anger, relief, grief, or confusion about what happened. Therapy can help you understand what remains and decide what you want to carry forward.
You do not have to know exactly where you stand before we begin. Many people hold more than one of these experiences at once.
The work
The question is not only what you were taught, but what it came to mean.
The same words can take on very different meanings depending on who spoke them, when you heard them, and what was at stake in believing them. A teaching about obedience, forgiveness, purity, sacrifice, or submission may have become intertwined with love, approval, safety, or the fear of losing them.
This is why simply revisiting beliefs often does not resolve their impact. Rather than debating whether a belief was right or wrong in the abstract, we pay attention to how it was lived and received in your particular life. Part of this work is to understand what you learned to do with your feelings, needs, anger, body, and wanting in order to remain connected to the people and communities that mattered to you.
There is no prescribed conclusion in this work. You may remain deeply connected to your faith, find your relationship to it changing, step away, or simply live with questions that do not need immediate resolution. The work is to help you understand what has shaped you and live with greater freedom, honesty, and connection to what matters most to you.
More on how I work.
Background
Faith and its impact can both be taken seriously.
Religious hurt or trauma is not just a category. It often involves a language, community, set of practices, and way of making meaning that have mattered deeply. You do not have to spend our sessions translating the theological language, meaning, or questions that have shaped your life.
My background includes a master’s degree in Spiritual Formation and Soul Care from Talbot School of Theology, training in spiritual direction, and ongoing postgraduate psychoanalytic training at the Newport Psychoanalytic Institute. Together, these inform a way of working that is theologically literate and psychologically attentive.
That combination allows us to take both faith and its impact seriously. You do not need to defend what was meaningful to you, minimize what hurt, or arrive having decided what you believe now. We can begin with your story and make room for its complexity.
About Nikole →Religious trauma
Frequently asked questions
Will you try to talk me out of my faith, or back into it?
Neither. I do not have an outcome I am steering you toward. My work is to help you understand what your religious history did to you and what it is still doing, and to give you room to reach your own conclusions about what you want to keep.
Is religious trauma a real thing?
Religious trauma is not a formal diagnosis in the DSM. That does not mean the experience is not real or that it does not have lasting effects. What people describe under that name is usually a mix of things clinicians do recognize: early relational injury, chronic shame, anxiety tied to authority and surveillance, complicated grief, and identity that had to be built around what was permitted. We work with what is actually there rather than with the label.
I am still going to church and things are mostly fine. Is that enough of a reason to come in?
Yes. Most of the people I see are functioning well by any external measure. You do not need a crisis or a dramatic story to justify looking at this. Persistent unease that you cannot explain is a good enough reason.
I left years ago. Why is it still affecting me?
Because what you left was not only a set of beliefs. It was the framework your earliest ideas about love, safety, authority, and your own worth were built inside. Leaving changes your position on the beliefs. It does not automatically dismantle the structure they were attached to, which is why the guilt, the flinching, and the grief often outlast the belief itself by years.
Do you work with pastors, ministry staff, and people in vocational ministry?
Yes. When your work, your faith, your social world, and your income all sit in the same place, there is often nowhere safe to say the true thing. Therapy can be that place. Sessions are confidential and are not shared with your church, your board, or your denomination.
Can we do this over telehealth?
Yes. I see clients in person in Newport Beach and Fullerton, and by telehealth anywhere in California. Telehealth is often the better fit for this particular work, especially if you live in a small faith community and privacy matters to you.
Do you take insurance?
I am a private-pay practice. Many clients use out-of-network benefits through a PPO plan, and I provide a monthly superbill you can submit for reimbursement. I also accept HSA and FSA cards. You can read more on the FAQs page.
A companion path
If faith is still the thing that holds.
Religion is rarely all one thing. Some of what you were given may have cost you and some of it may still be carrying you, and those can be true in the same person on the same Sunday.
If the sustaining part is the larger part right now, and what you are looking for is therapy that takes your spiritual life seriously rather than therapy about what went wrong in it, faith-integrated therapy describes that work. It is the same practice and the same clinician. You do not need to have sorted out which page you belong on before you call, and most people do not arrive knowing.
Next steps
Ready to stop carrying this alone? Let’s talk.
You can tell me as much or as little of the history as you want to. In-person in Newport Beach and Fullerton, or telehealth throughout California.
Schedule a free consultation →